Encountering Concrete Examples: 16

Right now, John is in North Carolina for two reasons. First, he's there for his mother's 88th birthday party. Some of the family got together today and celebrated. Happy Birthday, Mom! I'm sorry I couldn't be there. I'll bet the farm is beautiful right now. We still have snow on the ground in Connecticut, even though this was a freakishly snow-free winter.

The other reason for the visit is that this Thursday, the NC State class will be presenting their first stage proposals and we've been invited to attend. These will be proposals for conventional development. The rest of the term will be about preparing proposals for green development. It's quite exciting, getting to this stage. I hope to be able to report back next weekend on what John learns.

For today, though, I wanted to talk more about --yes!--countertops. Mark asked last week about concrete countertops. I know these are becoming quite trendy and I wanted to take a look and see: are they environmentally friendly? From what I've read, I think the answer is yes and no.

Apparently, the culprit in concrete is Portland Cement. Portland Cement, named after the Isle of Portland in southern England, is the binding agent in concrete. It isn't that the Portland Cement is environmentally unfriendly when it's in place in the countertop. It's the process of making the Portland Cement that's the problem. It uses a lot of resources and produces a large amount of greenhouse gases. But, it seems you can work part way around that by making concrete with half Portland Cement and half Fly Ash, a by-product of coal combustion. The claims are that it even makes the concrete more resistant to wear and staining. Here's a link to an article about slag cement.

This is one more case that points out how difficult it can be to decide what's truly green and what isn't. You have to look at the whole picture, from start to finish, and take into account all the energy and material costs that go into making a product--and its components. You also need to give some thought to what happens when an item becomes broken. Can it be fixed in an environmentally inexpensive way? Or does the first crack, tear or other breakdown mean nasty repairs, or worse, replacement. It's tempting when a product is cheap to simply toss it and get a new one when you're tired of it. That doesn't tend to be the case with something like countertops, but still, it's worth thinking about.